Schedule Reports

You can automatically send reports by scheduling the desired reports daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. Scheduled reports are good to update the team about the status or progress of some business process. With scheduled reporting you can promote data-driven decisions in your company or department without forcing employees to use a BI tool.

Simplest way to automate reports delivery is a built-in email subscriptions function: in this way users can subscribe to reports in a self-service manner.

For more advanced automations SeekTable has an API for the following actions in your account:

• export saved report to any supported format (PDF, Excel, CSV, HTML). You can even export table report to HTML with inline styles and place the report directly in email body - in the same way as it is placed in "Share by email" feature.
• share saved report by email (simplest way to deliver reports by email on schedule)
• upload CSV file to refresh existing CSV-based cube

You can automate these actions in the following ways:

• With Zapier: SeekTable app connector (beta) is already available for usage in Zaps.
  See Zapier integration how-to for more details.
• With Microsoft Power Automate: SeekTable connector is available for usage in flows.
  See Power Automate integration how-to for more details.
• Use SeekTable web API directly. You may call API methods with curl, PowerShell / bash scripts or from code. To run automations on schedule you may use Task Scheduler (Windows) or cron (Linux).

How to create pre-aggregated data snapshots

When your database is rather large execution of aggregate queries may take significant time (30+ seconds) which is not very suitable for data crunching. Universal solution for situations like this is usage of specialized analytical database; another alternative is taking pre-aggregated data snapshots that are refreshed periodically. Ideally if your database supports materialized views that are updated incrementally; if not (or if you don't have enough rights to do this) you can use this scenario to simulate such views with SeekTable:

1. In your DB-based cube create pivot table report that includes only dimensions you want use in reports by snapshot on rows + select all measures that you want to use in reports.
2. In "Format" tab disable "Grand Total" and "Totals row". Choose 50000 in "Limits" dropdowns. Save this report.
3. Export this report to CSV and create a new CSV-based cube. Edit this cube configuration and remove possible irrelevant measures (automatically suggested) and correct the labels if needed.
4. Use this CSV-based cube for reports by a snapshot data in a usual way.
5. Create a task with Zapier/MS Power Automate to refresh your CSV data snapshot on a schedule with these steps:
   1. Trigger action "On schedule": Daily/Hourly
   2. SeekTable connector "Find a report" (Zapier) or "Report Export" (MS Power Automate): choose a report that you prepared for the CSV export
   3. SeekTable connector "Upload CSV File": choose as target your CSV-based cube you created by CSV export.
   Automated refresh of CSV data may be performed with direct web API calls, of course.

NOTE: in this way you can create snapshots that have no more than 50,000 rows. To reduce the size of snapshot exclude dimensions with a lot of unique values (like timestamps - choose separate "year"/"month"/"day" dimensions instead) or apply additional filtering criteria with report parameters (say, use only last month/last year data).